


Shiny and New

by libbertyjibbit



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Body Horror, Gen, Mild Gore, Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 04:22:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18308099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/libbertyjibbit/pseuds/libbertyjibbit
Summary: “Nikola wanted to kill you, but I couldn’t let her. Not when you’re finally back with me.”Danny makes Tim one of the troupe.





	Shiny and New

He’d gone to the Carnival expecting to die. Welcoming it, even. Ready to finally rectify the mistake that had been made so long ago. He couldn’t take his brother’s place, but he could finally atone for allowing him to be taken at all.

His last thought as the world lights up around him is of Danny.

He wakes feeling wrong. His head feels foggy, thoughts sluggish, and he can’t move his limbs. He rolls his head slowly to one side. Arm, present and accounted for. He tries to lift it, willing it with is mind. Perhaps one of his fingers twitches; perhaps that is just his mind playing tricks. Slowly, so slowly, already feeling exhausted by the effort, he rolls his head the other way. That arm is there, too. It’s a mess of scrapes and bruises, but it’s attached to his body, and he has all his fingers. Good for him. He thinks about checking for his legs but that seems like too much work. If they’re gone, he decides he doesn’t miss them.

“Oh, you’re awake,” the voice makes his head hurt, and Tim winces, closing his eyes because it’s all he can do. “I’m so glad. I was worried you wouldn’t wake up, and that would be no fun. No fun at all.”

“Please,” Tim says, voice scratchy, “please stop talking.”

A titter, high pitched and grating. “Oh, but I want to talk to you. I want to discuss what you did, you naughty thing. Open your eyes.” Tim doesn’t, and the voice changes, grows sharp and impatient. “Make him open his eyes. I want him to look at me.”

A hand brushes against his face; it is cool and far too smooth, like wax. Tim wants to flinch from it but can’t. “Stop, stop,” he says, and opens his eyes. Anything to get that hand away.

“Over here, naughty boy,” the insane voice says, and Tim looks. In the back of his head, a voice starts screaming.

Perched on the end of a table is what might have once been a mannequin. It stares madly at him from one eye, the other an empty socket, face half-melted, its too-red mouth stretched into a wide smile. There are scattered limbs strewn about it, and as Tim stares, one of them moves, twitching at him in what is an unmistakable wave.

“There we go,” the voice says through that red, red smile. “Isn’t that better? I’m Nikola.”

“I know who you are.”

“Oh do you? That’s lovely; I thought you mightn’t remember, and then this wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.”

“And wouldn’t that be too bad.” Tim’s proud of how his voice comes out: dry, flat, even as he feels the fear settle low in his belly, bubbling like seltzer, threatening to overwhelm him. This is bad. This is so bad.

“It would!” Nikola agrees, sounding delighted. “Oh, I knew I liked you. Not that you aren’t to be punished, of course,” she adds, and for the first time the mannequin changes expression, mouth turning down in a moue of disappointment. “It was very wrong of you to disrupt our dance. But you’re so very pretty. We’ll make you even prettier, wont we?” her eye rolls to glance at someone – or something – just out of Tim’s sight, and then turns back to him. “I wanted to do it myself, but I’m not quite up to it yet, and he’s so eager to make you one of us. Let him see you now, don’t be shy.”

Tim’s breathing speeds up as the thing Nikola is speaking to moves into his line of sight. He both is and isn’t surprised to see his brother staring down at him, eyes wide and fixed on his face.

“Hey, Tim,” his brother says, and it’s almost right, that voice, only it isn’t, just wrong enough to climb under Tim’s skin, burrowing like worms, and he tries to squirm away from the feeling but he still can’t move.

“You’re not my brother,” he says, and he wants his voice to be strong, but it’s barely a whisper, cracked with desperate longing. It’s not Danny in front of him, not really, but he’s missed him, missed him so badly, and it hurts.

“Well, no, not exactly, but close enough,” the thing that isn’t Danny says, and Nikola laughs, high pitched and unhinged. “I missed you,” he adds, and Tim shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “No, no, no.”

“I did,” he says, insistent. “Nikola wanted to kill you, but I couldn’t let her. Not when you’re finally back with me.” He smiles, and rests one of his hands on Tim’s face. Tim pulls away as best he can, but the hand follows, insistent and waxy and _wrong_. It forces Tim to turn his head, so that he has to look into the smiling face above him. “We’ll dance together, Tim,” he says, and the smile grows.

“We all will,” Nikola agrees. “But first, naughty Tim, the pain.” She gives a delighted laugh. “Oh, I wish I could help.”

“Life’s full of disappointment,” Tim says, and then Danny gets started, and all he can do is scream.

He screams and he begs, and he tries to get away from the hands and pain but his body won’t move, won’t so much as twitch. He’s stuck, trapped, unable to do a thing as Danny very carefully begins to to cut, slicing through skin and muscle, opening him up from chest to groin, digging his hands into the cut he's made. He’s saying something; Tim can see his lips moving but he can’t hear him through the noises he’s making. He wonders if it’s an apology; but looking into the empty eyes above him he knows it isn’t.

“Please,” he says, voice hoarse from screaming. “Please stop, Danny.”

Danny smiles. It’s soft and fond, so familiar it hurts, far deeper than anything that’s been done to him so far. Tim sobs as Danny lifts a blood coated hand to stroke his face. “I was supposed to take care of you,” Tim says. Every word hurts. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’ll be all right now,” Danny says, thumb stroking along his cheekbone, painting it with his own blood. “Everything is going to be fine.” He leans down and kisses Tim’s forehead. His lips are hard, unyielding, wrong, but Tim is beyond caring. He leans into the hand on his face and closes his eyes.

He doesn’t manage to lose consciousness. Instead he drifts, somehow existing inside of the pain as Danny continues his work, opening him up and hollowing him out. He can hear himself screaming and begging for Danny to stop, please, please, it hurts, but it doesn’t seem real. Even the pain, intense as it is, doesn’t seem real. No matter how careful Danny’s being about it, there’s no way that he can have removed as much of Tim’s insides as he is without him dying, much less being awake, so it can’t be real, he thinks. The agony must be in his head, as well as the pain in his throat and the screams that ring in his ears. Even the screams themselves; after all, no one can scream without lungs. But scream he does, screams until his voice gives out and all he can hear are the wet, squelching sounds of whatever Danny is doing, occasionally combined with a high pitched instruction from Nikola.

“No, leave that,” she says, and Tim doesn’t want to look, but he can’t help it. He only gets a fleeting glance – it's too hard to lift his head and hold it there, and it falls back to the table with a soft thud he barely registers – but a glance is all he needs. Danny's hands have reached his chest. The table around him is strewn with his own insides as well as too much blood to be possible. He thinks he would be sick if he were capable anymore. No stomach to lurch and make things messy, he thinks with a half-hysterical giggle that fades into a horrified moan. He closes his eyes again and tries to think of something else, anything else but Danny’s hands cradling his somehow still beating heart.  

“The heart needs to stay,” Nikola says in a cheerful voice. “It’s why you turned out so lovely, after all.”

White noise fills Tim’s head. His heart. His Danny’s heart is in this – this thing that’s been working over him so diligently. Tim opens his eyes again, and there he is. His brother, real but not, head bent over his body, mouth screwed up in concentration. Tim is forcefully reminded of Danny doing maths homework the same way, brow furrowed and tongue between his teeth. It aches. He misses him. He misses him so much.

There’s no way to tell how long it lasts. At some point he’s sure he’s started to dream despite the pain and the horror, because nothing else could possibly explain the things he sees. The people he left behind; the ones he’d left with every intention of never seeing again. There’s Melanie, hands curled into fists, watching Elias being led away and wanting nothing more than to tear his throat out with her teeth. Basira, stumbling away from the Carnival, eyes unfocused, face set in a grimace of pain and terror. Daisy, surrounded by suffocating darkness, dirt in her mouth and roots wrapped around her wrists and ankles, keeping her pinned. He sees Martin, curled up on an old sagging mattress in a dimly lit room, arms wrapped around himself and taking deep, shaky breaths, trying desperately to stop the way his body trembles. And finally Jon, the last person in the world he wants to see, lying in a hospital bed, the only thing keeping him alive the machines that drone around him. His body is lifeless but his mind is aware, trapped in dreams, dreams that Tim thinks he can almost see, dancing around his head. He turns himself away, shutting his mind to those twisted shapes, not wanting to know. Tim wonders if Jon will dream of him now. He hopes not. He doesn’t want anything to do with Jonathan Sims or the Magnus Institute ever again, even if it’s only in the Archivist’s dreams.

The last thing he sees is his brother, bright and beautiful, smiling at him. “Promise that you’ll stay with me forever,” he says, and Tim says yes. Yes, of course, whatever you want.

When he opens his eyes, the first thing he thinks of is Danny.

He sits up, too fast, and nearly falls forward. He feels very light; much lighter than he ever been, but also stretched, somehow. His skin feels odd, unfamiliar. He puts a hand in front of him. It’s fatter than his hand used to be, fingers splayed wide, the skin over the palms puffed out.. The stitching at his wrists is rough, clumsy, and he can see bits of fluff escaping through one or two gaps. He brushes a curious finger over it.

“I’m not very good at sewing,” Danny says apologetically. Tim checks over his shoulder and finds him standing by the table, supporting Nikola, who is almost completely put back together. Tim notes the melted look of her limbs with no surprise, but no pleasure either. Perhaps once there would have been triumph in seeing her like this, but now he only feels mildly annoyed. She’ll need new limbs to dance properly. They’ll have to fix her now that he’s better.

“It’s fine,” he says, then pokes at the fluff. “I thought –“

“I wanted to make you a pretty mannequin,” Nikola says, pouting slightly, “but Danny likes you soft.”

Danny gives him an uncertain glance. “That’s okay, isn’t it? You don’t mind?” he asks.

“I don’t mind.” It will take some getting used to, but he can manage. Danny looks so hopeful, and he can’t deny him anything. Not anymore.  

Danny beams back, face shining. He holds out a hand. “And you’ll never leave? You’ll stay with me forever?”

Tim reaches out and takes Danny’s hand. It's far too hard, and he squeezes Tim's stuffed fingers too tightly, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hurt.  He smiles. It pulls at the stitching over his mouth, but he doesn’t mind. Danny is everything. He would put up with worse to make him happy.

Anything, he thinks. Anything you want.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. Please, if you like, let me know what you thought. :)


End file.
